Ascension: Amy Sullivan says that the era of the religious left has begun

Washington Monthly, Jan-March, 2008 by Paul Baumann

The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap

By Amy Sullivan

Scribner, 288 pp.

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It is widely bruited about these days that the once storybook marriage between the religious right and the Republican Party is troubled. Rumor has it that evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics have even been seen flirting with that most disreputable of suitors, the Democratic Party. The 2006 election of Senator Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Governor Bill flitter in Colorado, both pro-life Catholic Democrats, lends credence to these rumors, as does the brief panic felt by the Republican establishment over the presidential candidacy of Mike Huckabee. Indeed, speculation about the impending breakup got so intense last year that the ever-hopeful New York Times Magazine gave writer David D. Kirkpatrick the cover and 8,000 words in October to expatiate on "The Evangelical Crackup." Kirkpatrick quoted Marvin Olasky, a movement conservative and an evangelical, on the disillusionment felt by evangelicals toward President Bush and the GOP. "To some extent--we have to see how much--the Republicans have blown it," Olasky said. "That opportunity to lock up that constituency has vanished. The ball now really is in the Democrats' court."

Amy Sullivan agrees. Sullivan, nation editor at Time magazine (also a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly), and an evangelical herself, reminds her readers, in The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap, that 40 percent of what many Democrats think of as a monolithically right-wing evangelical movement describe themselves as political moderates. On questions of poverty and economic inequality, corporate malfeasance, access to health care, fair trade, and the environment, they reject the business-comes-first policies of the Republican Party. Yet skillful Republican manipulation of culture-war issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage--abetted by Democratic denigration of "values" voters--has driven these moderate evangelicals (and Catholics) into the Republican fold. In The Party Faithful, Sullivan argues that many have tired of the relentless antagonisms and divisive politics surrounding abortion, the culture wars, and Bush's messianic foreign policy--and that when Democrats make the effort to actually listen to and engage moderate evangelicals and Catholics, they can win over enough of them to significantly change the electoral map.

Sullivan makes clear that ignoring such voters, as the party has done for the last forty years, has proven a recipe for political decline and electoral defeat. The story includes Jimmy Carter, whose frank talk about faith got him half the evangelical vote in 1976, and who went on to pursue policies on issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment that outraged his evangelical base, creating an opportunity the Republican Party shrewdly exploited. As Sullivan observes, "the idea of organizing evangelicals into a conservative political force was the brainchild of a group of mostly secular New Right activists who saw conservative Christians as 'the greatest tract of virgin timber on the political landscape.'"

Bill Clinton, with his instinctive feel for religious gesture and his command of the evangelical idiom, remains the exception that proves the rule about the Democrats. Clinton, Sullivan argues, knew that Democrats had to appeal to religious voters, but "could never convince his party." Sullivan's admiration for Clinton extends to a willingness to accept his protestations of contrition over the Monica Lewinsky scandal; and she is perplexed that the adulteries and lies of Clinton's Republican accusers never elicited the same outrage that his transgressions did. It is a fair point, but one that ignores the peculiar psychological intimacy between a president and the American people, an intimacy that helps to explain the wide swings between admiration and disillusionment that so many presidents evoke in us.

In chronicling the Democratic Party's decades-long neglect of what she insists are millions of politically persuadable evangelicals and Catholics, Sullivan dangles the tantalizing prospect of a resounding Democratic victory in this year's presidential and congressional races, one that would recapture a pivotal slice of the religious vote. That victory, she argues, is there for the taking--if only Democrats (especially party activists and leaders) will stop going out of their way to alienate voters who possess strong religious convictions. The simple truth Democrats need to grasp is that for many Americans, religion, as Sullivan rightly notes, is "a proxy for a general moral worldview." Republicans have long understood this fact of political life, and have tailored their campaigns accordingly. "Talking about faith--or, broadly, about the values that underlie issues," Sullivan writes, "gives voters insight into what motivates the men and women who ask for their support." Consequently, it is usually a mistake for Democrats to emphasize what they plan to do, rather than what they believe in.